“Freedom for Marx, Freedom for Us” is the first instalment of “Materialities of Communist Freedom”, a series of considerations written by Jodi Dean for Communis. Read also on Communis its Spanish translation in “Libertad para Marx, libertad para nosotros.”
“Freedom for Marx, Freedom for Us” is the first of six considerations on freedom from the perspective of world communism. Initially presented at the European Graduate School in August 2025, these considerations — made publicly available on this occasion for the first time — aim to bring to life world communism as a perspective anchored in revolutionary theory and struggle. Rather than confining communism to specific periods and places, I emphasize the heterogeneous unity of movements animated by historical materialism, the conviction that oppressed people can change the world, and the consciousness of the necessarily interconnected nature of liberation.
— Jodi Dean
Freedom for Marx, Freedom for Us
Now more than ever “freedom” is a conflicted concept. It’s an instance of what Ghassan Kanafani calls the “blind language,” language that lacks meaning because it reflects nothing but private understanding.[1] Words are thrown about any which way, missiles of feeling launched without regard to what they’ll hit. Post-structuralism might encourage us to think in terms of “empty signifiers,” but at a cost: the inadmission of the affective charge imbuing words without meaning. Part of freedom’s affective charge comes from the way “free” points to unfreedom: free markets follow iron laws; free elections legitimate new authoritarianisms; free speech designates the circulation of lies. The Palestinian struggle has shown us how self-determination, the right of an occupied and oppressed people to liberation, has been rendered unintelligible as a fundamental freedom, its assertion demonized as terrorism even as Israeli state terror remains free to carry out genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, annexation, and indiscriminate bombings of ostensibly sovereign nations. Across the globe, the Right capitalizes on freedom’s signification of its loss by branding everything it opposes a threat to freedom. The Left then gets positioned as those who threaten or deprive us of basic freedoms. Hegemonized by the Right, freedom devolves into the power to do what one will. “Free” means shameless, unconstrained by laws, norms, or decency. To be free is to dominate.
Communists are sometimes read as dismissing freedom as bourgeois ideology. Famous lines from Capital, Volume 1, provide support. Marx refers to the market as “a very Eden of the innate rights of Man” ruled by “Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.” Freedom is the ideological screen obscuring the hidden abode of production and the exploitation of the worker. Lenin extends the critique in What Is To Be Done? He writes: “‘Freedom’ is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom of labour, the working people were robbed.”[2] Freedom is the ideological cover not only for exploitation but also for imperialism. Clearly, communists have been some of bourgeois freedom’s sharpest critics.
But we should not reduce the communist perspective on freedom to its critique of bourgeois ideology. This is less because of its inaccuracy (given the emancipatory core of the communist project) than it is because of the ways that defenses against the charge that communists don’t value freedom can end up with all sorts of distortions. In defense of freedom, communists concede to liberal and republican premises, arguing on the wrong terrain and affirming notions of freedom that prioritize individual rights, private property, and citizenship. Here we might locate some of the debates over determinism and voluntarism, structure and agency, the relation between freedom and necessity, and so on.
For over half a century, the Cold War’s virulent anti-communism mined and fortified this terrain, attacking communists as opponents of freedom and reinforcing the ideological foundation of imperialism. Europe, the UK, and the US parade as the civilizational guarantors of freedom, its originators, theoreticians, and defenders. Struggles for freedom — especially against those who claim to guarantee it, against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism — recede from view, historically insignificant, backwards, epiphenomenal to a trajectory the course of which is already set. The riddle of history has been solved by constitutional guarantees of basic rights, the primary right being that of private property. Everything else is just tinkering. The West brings freedom and democracy, so if the West isn’t bringing it, then it’s neither freedom nor democracy.
More than Non-Domination
Perhaps because this century’s ongoing imperialist violence has irreparably damaged this lie, perhaps because we must defend those fighting for self-determination, and perhaps because inequality has intensified with capital’s becoming neofeudal, there has been a new wave of interest in Marxism and, more specifically, in Marx’s thinking on freedom. Most significant here is the republican turn in Marx studies. In recent books, William Clare Roberts and Bruno Leipold situate Marx in the republican tradition of political thought, explicitly rejecting Lenin’s emphasis on English political economy, German philosophy, and French socialism as the three formative sources and component parts of Marxism. Roberts and Leipold take as their starting points the popularity of republican ideas in the workers’ struggles in 19th century Europe. They emphasize how the republican movement supported democracy and popular sovereignty, conceiving of liberty as the absence of arbitrary power, that is, as non-domination. Citizens were to collectively control the laws to which they were subject.
Roberts’s Marx’s Inferno reads Capital as a work of political theory that offers a critique of modern social relations as relations of domination. Marx’s critique is moral: capitalism is a threat to freedom. In the factory, workers are subjected to personal despotism. In the capitalist system writ large, capitalists as well as workers are in thrall to the impersonal domination of economic laws. Roberts rejects the idea that Marx views freedom as collective self-realization or collective self-mastery. On the contrary, Marx is following the republican currents of his time in viewing freedom as non-domination. Roberts writes: “The principled commitments of socialism, according to Marx, are not to equality and community, but to freedom – conceived as non-domination – and to the association that secures and expresses this freedom.”[3] Socialism universalizes, radicalizes, what is fundamentally the republican idea of freedom.
Leipold’s Citizen Marx likewise emphasizes Marx’s indebtedness to the republican tradition. Everyone agrees that Marx’s early writing was explicitly republican, “committed to overcoming the arbitrary power of despotic regimes through a democratic republic” where the people are active and sovereign.[4] This is not controversial. Leipold goes further. He argues that freedom was Marx’s principle value throughout his life and that his idea of freedom remained the republican one of non-domination. Marx’s commitments to political struggle and political institutions were indebted to the republican association of law and liberty. Even his later criticisms of republicanism incorporated republican ideas.
Roberts and Leipold contrast their republican Marx with the communist tradition. They don’t go into this tradition as a tradition of struggle. The twentieth century resides in the shadows of the yet-to-come, a lurking authoritarianism more than a liberatory promise. While they interpret Marx in the context of the struggles of his time, for the most part their treatment of later Marxists is limited to academic commentary or relatively quick rejections of Lenin and “orthodox” Marxism. Their republicanism focuses on 19th century European debates and likely the hope that shearing off communism might make Marx a better resource for today’s social movements. So they contrast what they see as the core of republican freedom — non-domination, freedom from arbitrary power — with freedom as self-realization, to a large extent beyond politics (and, if not beyond politics then implicated in a politics that goes too far, intrudes too much). Exemplary of this other, rejected, conception of freedom would be the lines from The German Ideology: “Free activity for the Communists is the creative manifestation of life arising from the free development of all abilities of the whole person.”[5]
Roberts’ and Leipold’s emphasis on Marx’s republicanism contrasts with interpretations such as Althusser’s. As is well known, Althusser sees a sharp break between the early and the later Marx, reading the later Marx in terms of his “theoretical anti-humanism,” that is, in terms of his rejection of the categories of bourgeois philosophy and introduction of the new concepts of “social formation, productive forces, relations of production, superstructure, ideologies, determination in the last instance by the economy, specific determination of the other levels, etc.”[6] In his later work, Marx adopted a problematic that broke with the empiricism and idealism of his prior humanism. He had “new principles and a new method.” Historical materialism, Althusser insists, is a theoretical revolution, an epistemological break.
Consider bourgeois freedom. Althusser presents it in terms of its function as the ideology of the ruling class. He writes:
Its ideology consists of this play on the word freedom, which betrays the bourgeois wish to mystify those (‘free men’!) it exploits, blackmailing them with freedom so as to keep them in harness, as much as the bourgeoisie need to live its own class rule as the freedom of those it is exploiting. Just as a people that exploits another cannot be free, so a class that uses an ideology is its captive too.[7]
Freedom points to the bourgeoisie’s real relation to capitalist liberal law and to its imaginary relation that says that all men are free, including the workers they exploit. The ideology of freedom functions in two ways: mystifying the exploited and legitimizing the exploiters. In a sense, the bourgeoisie believes its own rhetoric. It is compelled to believe that those whom it exploits are free, that workers choose to work. This is what lets the bourgeoisie justify to itself its position in the world. It deserves to rule because everyone is making free choices. The entire system is a freely chosen one. Freedom is one of the concepts through which the bourgeoisie gives universality to its demands, its position, its aims, its laws.
Marx and Engels say as much in The German Ideology. The feudal aristocracy emphasized loyalty and honor; the bourgeoisie emphasizes freedom and inequality:
For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.[8]
Each new class, to carry through its aims, has to give its ideas the form of universality. That some of us rule is right for all of us.
This is not a critique of the ideas that a new class uses to represent its interests as the common interest. It’s a historicization of them, a contextualization of them, an attention to their conditions of emergence. It doesn’t tell us, for example, how the ideas might be used. On the one hand, they might be used against the ruling class. James Martel has developed the concept of misinterpellation to make this point.[9] People for whom freedom and equality were not intended respond to the hail and pick up the banner. Martel uses C.L.R James’ account of the Haitian Revolution in The Black Jacobins as an example. Slaves took freedom and equality, the rights of men, seriously, claiming them for themselves. The very universality of bourgeois ideas of freedom enables their use in ways counter to the interests of the ruling class.
On the other hand, might the oppressed actually lose when they speak the language of the oppressor? When the categories and worldview of the oppressing class shape their vision of the world? Half the battle is won when one speaks the language of one’s enemy. This is one of the issues at stake in the current reading of Marx as a republican: the dominant ideology continues to dominate. Marx didn’t provide a new approach at all. He affirms the universality of the old one.
Communist Freedom: the actuality of its movement
The republican reading tries to pry Marx away from the parties and struggles he helped animate, as if his “being republican” could leverage him in a new round of anti-communism, as if it could tell us something about the politics we should pursue today. A more powerful orientation comes from world communism’s tradition of revolutionary struggle. Rather than focusing on the writing and context of a single author and how he or she thinks about freedom, I am interested in continuities and accretions associated with the idea of freedom as it appears in the writings of revolutionaries in the communist tradition. How does communist freedom unfold? What does the struggle for freedom require?
By inhabiting the perspective of world communism, I am rejecting injunctions to regional and temporal particularity. The local and historically contemporaneous should not be treated as exclusive loci of freedom and identity. The assumption that they are rests uneasily against the fact of world history, a world market, imperialism, and mutually reinforcing practices and legacies of struggle. I also reject the assumption of an “orthodox” Marxism, which is typically introduced only in its rejection, although what, exactly, is being rejected tends to remain unstated (is it Kautsky? the COMINTERN? Stalin?). Instead, I affirm the communist tradition that unfolds in revolutionary theory and practice. This tradition is heterogeneous and alive.[10] Concerns with the producers and the oppressed extend beyond the opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Production intertwines with reproduction and its conditions. Class struggles involve peasants, the petite bourgeoisie, and the lumpen. They are struggles of indigenous, colonized, and neocolonized people. Markets, nations, peoples, and land are all in the world rather than delimited within a state and community always imagined as somehow European.
Too often even communists reduce our tradition to one of splits and divisions, as if our most distinctive attribute was disagreement: Bolshevik or Menshevik, Stalin or Trotsky, Eastern or Western Marxism, and so on down to the most obscure renderings of forks in party lines as lineages of descent. Left attachment to our own fragmentation ends up parodic and depressed. No wonder no one follows us. We don’t even follow ourselves. In contrast to this melancholic incapacitation, I consider developments, variations, and applications of historical material method as the productive creativity of world communism, the actuality of communist movement. Instead of tracing breaks and revisions, I draw out an approach to and vision of freedom in the struggle for its realization in the world. The approach is unified rather than uniform, an accumulation of knowledge of and through struggles, knowledge that is provisional and changing, and that builds through that acknowledgement.
I could have chosen other communist revolutionaries. The ones I discuss in these considerations are a base to amend and enrich, exemplars of a tradition united in its insistence on the inextricability of thought and action. In the words of Amilcar Cabral, it rejects acting without thinking and thinking without action.[11] The world communist tradition puts into practice Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: the point is to change the world. It embodies the drive to build the power to make that change, in contexts that are themselves necessarily changing.
We need to reassemble this tradition, to recall the heterogeneous unity of the struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, the analyses that prioritized the self-determination of oppressed people (women, national minorities, neocolonies) and the tactical necessity of building alliances of the oppressed. In our setting of neofeudalizing capitalism where fragmentation is taken for granted, even encouraged, and critique is disconnected from practical action because the relations and forms for practical action have themselves been fractured and effaced, thinking through and with communist revolutionaries may help us build the organizations and practices necessary for the fight today. At the very least, it may give us second thoughts about the ways that critique has become coterminous with dividing, cutting, and isolating such that combining, building, unifying, generalizing, and totalizing are so often treated as suspect.
An advantage of the perspective of world communism is that it’s not Eurocentric. It doesn’t privilege Marx but considers instead the speeches and writings of revolutionaries inspired by Marx. Few if any of them poured over his every statement trying to make sure that they understood every last subtlety of his thought. Few if any made tracing the development of his ideas their primary goal. They took Marx as a critical guide for thinking and action in the struggle for liberation. Whether or not Marx was influenced by republican ideals doesn’t tell us how communist revolutionaries understood what they were fighting for and how they attempted to put this understanding into action.
I don’t simply take the perspective of world communism: I construct it.
One might think it’s eclectic to bring together writings from Hungary, Peru, Bolivia, Palestine, Burkina Faso, the USSR, and so on rather than situate them specifically by culture and period. One might want a more specific set of comparisons, where instead of blending writings together the point would be to contrast them with respect to their national and historical circumstances. These are valid concerns that point to alternative methods. My wager is that this blending gives us insight into communist freedom as it has been worked out by the party of communists over time and in struggle. I don’t simply take the perspective of world communism; I construct it.
World Communism
Is there such a world communist idea of freedom that comes out of the struggles of exploited, oppressed, and colonized people? One answer might be: no, freedom is a bourgeoise notion, intertwined with and constitutive of bourgeois ideology. Another answer might be: there is no general communist freedom; there are only culturally particular freedoms, visions of freedom tied to their time and place. The pretense of universality is the conceit of bourgeois ideology. Both these answers should be rejected.
To reduce freedom to bourgeois ideology makes illegible the vision of freedom animating the Haitian revolution, the Black freedom struggle, the anti-colonial revolutions, and the Third World Liberation movement. Writing from C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins) and W.E.B. Du Bois (Black Reconstruction in America) loses its force, its relevance. Liberation struggles that invoke universal ideals — and rely on these ideals to mobilize people to rise up against occupation, exploitation, and oppression — are minimized, defanged, and misrepresented, as if the calls for freedom were misguided and inauthentic, a misunderstanding on the part of those in struggle, who are somehow mystified in their relations to the world. Likewise, reducing freedom movements to their immediate contexts deprives them of the histories and solidarities they themselves draw on in the fight for self-determination. Despite the fact that communist revolutionaries saw their struggles in world historical terms, as deeply interconnected across time and place, their movements are tethered to their contexts, regional conflicts of particular interest.
Walter Rodney is helpful here when he describes Marxism as a method and an ideology. Marxism is a method that begins with man’s relation to the material world, with the processes and relations of production and reproduction. Rodney is of course building from Marx and Engels. In The German Ideology, they explain:
The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.[12]
To paraphrase Amilcar Cabral: don’t confuse reality with the thoughts in your head. There’s a difference between what is and what we imagine (even as what we imagine is part of what is). Speaking and writing in the 1960s and 70s in Guyana, Tanzania, and Jamaica (he was banned from teaching there in 1968 which led to riots and protests), Rodney criticizes pan-Africanists who use “Western” technologies but balk at “Western” ideas for relying on a false division between the natural and cultural. He observes that the materialist method, like any tool or technology, can be applied anywhere. Marxism isn’t a “foreign” system imposed on the Third World. It’s a method of analysis for confronting the capitalist and imperialist system imposed on the Third World.
Marxism is also an ideology, a set of ideas with a politics that speaks to the interests of a class. Rodney emphasizes that it’s an ideology that speaks to the exploited and oppressed with the aim of undermining the system that exploits and oppresses them. For him, this means Marxism is a Third World ideology. It’s no wonder, he says, that colonial powers wanted to keep Marxism out of the Third World. It’s no wonder that colonial institutions cultivated a generation of scholars “who were idealists, hostile to Marxism, who took the capitalist system for granted.”[13] These idealists helped maintain the neocolonial conditions that served imperialist interests. In contrast, Marxism provided a framework for criticizing and transforming this system – as struggles and revolutions in China, Viet Nam, Cuba, and on the African continent made clear.
My considerations explore the idea of freedom as it appears in communist movement. I use the modifier “materialities” to draw out the historical materialist method of analyzing material conditions and using this analysis to guide revolutionary political practice. For communists in struggle, material conditions encompass not only economics but also politics and society, the possibilities afforded by technological and cultural development, the global constellation of forces and resulting logics of struggle. My guiding concern is to bring out the specifically communist approach to freedom that arises in the Marxist tradition in the course of the political struggles of the twentieth century. What matters is less what Marx thought or said, than what communists have said and done in the struggle for liberation.
Materialist analysis shows how historical expansions in freedom in relation to production, that is, with respect to the collective ability to regulate nature, are accompanied by new forms of control (division of labor, growth of world market, development of the state). The industries associated with the development of capitalism depend on proletarians forced to sell their labor power to survive. The history of this development is world history: production and exchange bind people into relations of inequality and dependence. They exceed local and national barriers in myriad everyday material ways – food (coffee, sugar, wheat), clothing, fuel, etc. – that testify to world economy in its simultaneously generative, expropriative, and destructive dimensions. Commerce, trade, colonialism, silver and gold mined in America and transported back to Europe, people shipped from Africa and forced into slavery, war – all are inextricable aspects of the global division of labor and the universal competition of the world market. This competition, Marx and Engels tell us, “produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilized nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations.”[14]
In contrast to the clear and pithy republican notion of freedom as non-domination, the world communist idea of freedom is more complex. It has four features.
The first is the critique of ideologies of freedom, including but not limited to bourgeois notions. In 1843, Marx offered an early version of this critique in “On the Jewish Question.” There he emphasizes the limits of political emancipation and appeals to an ideal of human emancipation.
The second feature is a relation to necessity, that is to say, an appreciation of freedom’s irreducibly material dimension. We are “burdened with matter,” material beings in a material world, an ever-changing world of nature and of our own making. We are also irreducibly connected to others. Consciousness itself is social, even if, especially if, at a particular point in time it “emancipates itself from the world” in the form of “pure” theory, philosophy, and religion, as Marx and Engel establish in The German Ideology. Freedom involves a conscious relation to its material and collective conditions, an understanding of necessity rather than a set of metaphysical illusions regarding its overcoming. Instead of arising out of notions of rights or the free will, communist freedom starts from an understanding of the historical conditions on which it depends. “Freedom,” Engels explains, “consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.”[15]
In Capital, Volume 3, Marx presents freedom as a realm that rests on an ever-expanding realm of necessity.[16] He writes that “in all social formations and possible modes of production,” man has to grapple with necessity. This realm of necessity expands as our wants and needs increase, as do “the forces of production which satisfy these wants.” Marx suggests that this expanding realm of necessity admits of freedom, that it can become freer insofar as it comes under the common control of the associated producers, the conditions of labor improve, and the length of the working day is shortened. But it cannot be eliminated.
I’ve emphasized that communist freedom is attuned to freedom’s material and collective conditions of possibility. Therefore, and here is its third feature, it concerns itself with putting ideas into practice. It is explicitly engaged with the creation of new forms for the coordination of activity, with new institutions and new practices and habits. Coordination, to be free coordination, requires explanation and education. Communists take people as they are, people who have developed in class society under conditions of oppression, people who can and will change when given the proper knowledge. Communist revolutionaries thus aim to connect theory to the masses, explaining to them why the struggle needs to go in a particular direction and what this direction requires. It’s not about ordering people around: understanding is a material force in the hands of the people.
Finally, world communism approaches freedom as a process, as being built in a history and a context rife with challenges and contradictions. The project of freedom takes different forms: forms for organizing production and reproduction (industries and technologies), forms of struggle (armed, political, social, and cultural), forms of association, planning, and governance (commune, state, dictatorship of the proletariat, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution).
If a most succinct version of freedom in the world communist tradition is desirable, we could do worse than viewing it as the material practice of institutionalizing collective self-determination, recognizing here an expansive sense of materiality within combined and uneven histories of struggle.
Freedom Not Without Premises
I conclude this first consideration by returning to The German Ideology. I do so not because Marx and Engels establish the doctrine against which the fidelity of each and all is to be measured but to begin to sketch out the discursive field that informs world communist thinking and writing. It’s a rich field. Therefore we need to set out some initial guideposts, the premises that will come to be shared, the orientations for struggle.
From the start what appears in this incomplete and posthumously published text is a rich variety of interrelated notions of freedom irreducible to republican nondomination. By my assuredly incomplete count there are at least sixteen different formulations, including: voluntary as opposed to natural activity; control over one’s own actions as opposed to actions determined by a given division of labor that establishes who was is by virtue of what one does; the social regulation of general production that results from the communist revolution; the privilege of the few; domination over nature; conscious mastery of the world market; bourgeois ideology; the “personal freedom” that is only possible in real community as opposed to illusory community where it constitutes a fetter; free development of the capacities of the whole person; abolition of labor, the division of labor, and/or private property; unrestricted self-activity; appropriation of the totality of productive forces and development of the totality of capacities. Any one of these can and has been singled out as “the” communist notion of freedom. They can also be linked together as components of communist freedom. For example, individual freedom is only possible if private property and the division of labor are abolished and production is organized communistically.
More significant than any single version of freedom, though, is the movement of the ideas and the relations between them. These alternatives are not like choices in a supermarket. Rather, they are connected within the unfolding and expanding of collective power over material conditions, the movement from what is given by nature and chance to what is created, chosen, and brought under cooperative control. Reducing communist freedom to republican non-domination misses the method of analysis — the materialism that situates freedom in the changing contexts that make it possible even as they raise new contradictions and challenges; the specific ties to changes in the development and conditions of production; the contradictions between forces and relations of production, that is, between humans efforts to control their material environment and the social relations arising out of these efforts. Marx and Engels’ analysis moves from a critique of “pure thought,” idealism, to an insistence on “actual living human beings,” which means embodied, in relation with nature and the world, and in relation to each other; people producing their material life and their relations with each other.
“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”[17] Liberation can’t be merely a mental act, a matter of consciousness, an achievement of philosophy or of law. It depends on material, historical conditions, on developments in industry, agriculture, commerce, and communication. It requires food, housing, clothing. It can’t be conceived in terms of the individual in the abstract because the individual is always situated in a time and place with its own conditions of production and reproduction. The individual serf, for example, encounters a different set of determinations from the individual proletarian or the individual bourgeois. There are “local and national barriers” to freedom.
The development of humans’ relation to the natural world is a development of social relations, as we see in the division of labor. Freedom from the vagaries of nature generates new kinds of determination and control, even as the division of labor appears natural, given, involuntary. The very collective activity people engage in as they interact with nature in production controls them. And this continues and expands into the world market, a force beyond our control that creates an “all around dependence.” The freedom that accompanies increased control over nature thus brings about new kinds of control, unfreedom, dependence.
Finally, unlike the view of freedom as non-domination, the world communist approach to freedom takes into account how freedom appears under capitalist and imperialist conditions. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels attend to this appearing and its effects.
The division between the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of things.[18]
The accidental nature of conditions of life emerges historically with the bourgeoisie. Prior to that, food, housing, and work were given, inseparable from one’s existence within a community —individuals didn’t have to go look for them. With people’s separation from the land, these conditions are no longer given. They seem freer, when in reality individuals are more subjected to contingency, arbitrariness, and violence. The increase of such separation makes determination hard to see. My choices may seem like my choices, but I have to find work, find housing, find a partner, make friends, get insurance, pay for a phone, secure transportation, maintain a degree of health, in an endless array of compulsory securings that never result in security. Freedom is how our non-freedom appears.
Notes
[1] Ghassan Kanafani, “Thoughts on Change and the ‘Blind Language,’” trans. Barbara Harlow and Nejd Yaziji, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 10 (1990): 137-157.
[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm.
[3] William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, Princeton University Press, 2017: 241.
[4] Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Political Thought, Princeton University Press, 2024: 8.
[5] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03abs.htm.
[6] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1964/marxism-humanism.htm.
[7] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1964/marxism-humanism.htm.
[8] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm.
[9] James Martel, The Misinterpellated Subject, Duke University Press, 2020.
[10] See Katherine Gordy’s insightful “Strategic Deployments: The universal/local nexus in the work of Jose Carlos Mariategui, Comparative Political Theory in Time and Place, Daniel J. Kapust and Helen M. Kinsella, eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 131 – 1 53.
[11] Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral, trans. Michael Wolfers, Monthly Review Press, 1979: 80.
[12] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.
[13] Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution, Verso, 2022: 56.
[14] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01c.htm.
[15] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htm.
[16] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm.
[17] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.
[18] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm.
Featured image: Amilcar Cabral. Public domain photo courtesy of Mosaic.
